The Fickle Enthusiast

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Loyd Case is out enjoying a much-deserved vacation right now, so you’ll have to suffer through my own ramblings in the “Notes from the Lab” column this week. We’ll return you to your regularly scheduled Loyd-isms in a week or two.

AMD vs. Intel. ATI vs. Nvidia. Xbox vs. Playstation. Apple vs. Microsoft. Microsoft vs. anything really. The world of tech enthusiasts is littered with “us vs. them” camps, and I often wonder if this kind of brand loyalty really holds any merit. Sure, there are companies that have never let me down in the past and have therefore earned my trust (like Pixar), but it doesn’t really influence my purchasing decisions all that much. I use Windows all the time, I build my own PCs, but I recently purchased a Macbook Pro. I don’t like the iTunes business model, but that didn’t stop me from recognizing what is great about an iPod.

A lot of hardcore tech fans and gamers aren’t like that. For some—a vocal minority, but one with a lot of influence—it’s not enough just to prefer Nvidia cards over ATI. For these fans, it becomes important to take every opportunity to praise Nvidia’s products in public and slam ATI’s. The goal is to be part of the “winning” team, I suppose; to influence other people’s buying decisions to mimic their own.

I find this fanboy mentality interesting, but not especially productive. Especially humorous (to me, anyway) is the way that the fan of Company A will slam Company B on the great and powerful Internet, and then have the nerve to call a someone a “fanboy” in the most derogatory way possible whenever a legitimate advantage of Company B’s products is mentioned. It’s as if there is no room for personal preference or detached analytical discussion. You’re either with us or against us.

Enthusiasts have embraced AMD’s Athlon (and Athlon XP, and Athlon 64) products whole-heartedly. To be fair, since the introduction of the Athlon, AMD has pretty consistently delivered superior overall performance at a comparable price to Intel’s processors. AMD’s CPUs have lead the pack in gaming applications in particular, which is of course a big deal to hardcore PC fans. Now, Core 2 Duo stands to change all that. In our early previews of the new Intel CPU, we found it outpacing AMD’s best in almost every situation, including gaming, and often by a wide margin—all this at comparable (or cheaper) prices, with less power consumption. We don’t have a final review of the Core 2 Duo just yet, but we really think it’s going to be performance and value leader until AMD can come up with a next-gen CPU architecture.

Will the enthusiasts jump ship, and dump their AMD-based systems for an Intel one? I think they will. As much as the hardcore loves to put a stake in the ground, they’re equally willing to abandon the companies for which they express such love when something truly better comes along. We don’t see this much in the ATI/Nvidia rivalry because, frankly, the two companies continue to release very closely matched products. But if one graphics company all of a sudden put out a GPU that delivers 40% better performance with a superior feature set at the same price as the other’s (not a likely scenario, by the way), those fanboys would flip-flop to the other side in a heartbeat.

If you think the fickle enthusiast is bad, try reading up on Loyd’s Old Gear Fetish commentary.

This fickle nature is good. Products should compete on their own merits. Sure, if a company is highly unethical or actually dangerous in some way, it’s probably a good idea not to give them your money by purchasing their products. For all the talk about which companies are “evil” in the tech world, they’re really not all that different. The big rivalries in tech are between companies where there are plenty of skeletons in the closets of both sides. The important thing to remember is that not every user has the same wants, needs, or habits. Competing products are rarely superior in every way, and it’s important to recognize the merits of even those products you don’t choose for yourself, because those merits might make them a better match for someone else.

This Week on ExtremeTech

Our fabulous Case Mod Contest is still going strong, with some really creative and impressive submissions so far. Our weekly prizes are pretty sweet, and the grand prize is a totally awesome package of everything you need to build a high-end Core 2 Duo system, so be sure to enter that mod of yours (and tell your friends). Entry is as easy as taking a few pictures and sending an email or two. We’ll have another weekly winner at the end of the week, and we’ve got some other interesting stuff lined up.

Michael Muchmore takes a look at Zoho Virtual Office, and Victor Loh will have a review of a nice eSATA RAID storage device. Our ongoing series about the People Behind DirectX 10 continues with Part 3 this week, an interview with Nvidia’s Chief Scientist David Kirk (catch Part 1 and Part 2 before you read it). All that and more this week on ExtremeTech.

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